Crystal Feimster - Department of Black Studies, Yale University

This is Ashley Newby and you’re listening to The Black Studies podcast, a series of conversations examining the history of the field. Our conversations engage with a wide range of activists and scholars - senior figures in the field, late doctoral students, and everyone in between, culture workers, and political organizers - in order to explore the cultural and political meaning of Black Studies as an area of inquiry and its critical methods.

Today's conversation is with Crystal N. Feimster, Associate Professor of African American Studies and History and affiliated faculty in American Studies and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Yale University, where she also serves as the Harvey Goldblatt Head of Pierson College. A native of North Carolina, she is a historian of nineteenth- and twentieth-century African American history, U.S. women’s history, and the American South. Her scholarship examines racial and sexual violence, bridging social and political history to illuminate long-obscured dimensions of the American past. Attentive to absences and asymmetries in the archive, she draws on gender studies, critical race theory, literary scholarship, and psychoanalysis to interpret some of the most elusive and traumatic facets of human experience.

Professor Feimster earned her Ph.D. in History from Princeton University and her B.A. in History and Women’s Studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of the prizewinning Southern Horrors: Women and the Politics of Rape and Lynching (Harvard University Press), recipient of the W.E.B. Du Bois Book Prize and honorable mention for the Darlene Clark Hine Book Prize. Her award-winning scholarship also includes the article “Keeping a Disorderly House in Civil War Kentucky,” which received the Kentucky Historical Society’s Collins Award for best article in the Register of the Kentucky Historical Society, and “Rape and Mutiny at Fort Jackson: Black Laundresses Testify in Civil War Louisiana,” which received honorable mention for the Letitia Woods Brown Article Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians. She has published widely in leading journals and has written essays for broader audiences in The New York Times, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and Slate. She is currently completing two books, Truth Be Told: The Battle for Freedom in Civil War Era Louisiana and Uncivil: Sex and Violence in the Civil War South.

Her professional appointments reflect her leadership in the field. She is President of the Southern Association of Women’s Historians, a member of the Executive Board of the Society of American Historians, Associate Editor of Civil War History, and Contributing Editor to Labor. She previously served as Co-President of the Coordinating Council for Women in History and has held numerous leadership roles in national scholarly organizations. Her research has been supported by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Institute for Advanced Study, and other distinguished institutions. A devoted and award-winning teacher, Professor Feimster offers well-subscribed courses on the Long Civil Rights Movement, African American Women’s History, Critical Race Theory, and the Women’s Liberation Movement. In recognition of her commitment to undergraduate and graduate mentorship, she has received multiple honors, including the Poorvu Family Award for Interdisciplinary Teaching, the Yale Provost Teaching Prize, the Berkeley College Faculty Mentoring Prize, the Afro-American Cultural Center’s Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching and Mentoring, and the Graduate Mentoring Award in the Humanities.